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"As we focus on climate change, we must also act decisively to protect
the living world while we still have time. It would be humanity’s
ultimate achievement." - E.O. Wilson
Nevada is poised to vote on whether to increase its
renewable portfolio standard (RPS) - the share of electricity required to come
from renewable sources - to 50% by the year 2030, without any plan for
protecting Nevada's increasingly vulnerable wildlands. An increased RPS
without corresponding plans to protect wildlands is sure to spur a
second rush of solar and wind projects, but continuing to burn fossil
fuels will compound the ongoing harmful effects of climate change on
that same landscape. A more sensible path - providing stronger
incentives for solar on rooftops and over parking lots and diverting
larger projects to already-disturbed lands - has eluded the state's
policymakers and environmental groups.
The
ballot measure - Question 6 - will essentially authorize Nevada's…

The Trump administration is proposing to open up hundreds of square
miles of western Mojave slopes and central California grasslands to
hydraulic fracturing (also known as fracking). Oil and gas companies'
fracking technique involves injecting thousands of gallons of toxic fluids into the ground to break open pockets of fossil fuels. Not
only do these fluids contaminate groundwater supplies, allowing fracking
will also make it more profitable for oil and gas companies to
industrialize vast swaths of grassland, Joshua tree woodland, and oak
woodland to energy exploration.

Oil
and gas fracking in this area would bring miles of access roads, well
pads, and evaporation ponds containing toxic chemicals harmful to
wildlife. Not to mention the additional greenhouse gas emissions that
such drilling would enable, worsening the ongoing impacts of climate
change on wildlife and humans alike.

Particularly
hard hit would be the wildlands north of Tehachapi stretching all the …